Busch, who is in charge of DIA’s big data strategy, said foundational intelligence modernization is one of the agency’s top priorities.

“We figured out a long time ago, if you get everything to geo, data starts fusing really, really well,” Busch said, adding that about 85 percent of the world’s data has some geographic attribute or quality.

Busch said DIA hopes to leverage the knowledge of USGIF as the GEOINT Community’s professional society to seek solutions for foundational intelligence modernization at GEOINT 2016.

“We know what foundational is, that’s well defined,” Busch said. “What we don’t know is how we get [to modernization]. … We’re trying to dial in this answer, it’s great to have this forum and [the symposium] to go and do this. We want to have that dialogue.”

Gordon said 200 intelligence officers from across all NGA directorates would attend GEOINT 2016. Each officer attending had “to prove that they had something they wanted to accomplish with you,” Gordon told the audience. “Something they wanted to learn, to know, to advance.”

Geggus described the GEOINT 2016 theme of The GEOINT Revolution as fitting as industry grows, extends, and scales so fast it can be difficult for government to keep up. He said NGA’s engagement strategy for the 200 officers would be collective learning—to get the government personnel to shift their concept of industry partnerships from an exchange of goods and services to an exchange of ideas and perspectives.

“The benefit is for those folks to come back and help change perspective and help us reshape how we move our enterprise forward,” Geggus said. “We have this auspicious goal to take these 200 officers and bring them together as a collective. Part of that is through technology. The idea is to assign each officer two industry partners to engage with, to go learn, and then share and report back to the group. The idea is to get full coverage of the event.”

Gordon said NGA Director Robert Cardillo intends in his GEOINT 2016 keynote address to grade NGA on how the agency has performed against the strategy he presented at GEOINT 2015. Cardillo is scheduled to speak Monday at 11:30 a.m. in the Osceola ballroom.

“He’s going to tell the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Gordon said. “We think there’s more good than any of the other two, but he’ll be pretty candid about where we’ve done well and where there’s still work to do.”

Gordon said she intends to engage with industry and other partners at the Symposium to seek new ideas and solutions in the following areas: acquisition, GEOINT services, cloud migration, analytic modernization, and more.

Busch will speak at the Government Pavilion Stage in the exhibit hall at 2:30 p.m. Monday. Gordon and Geggus will present from the Government Pavilion Stage alongside NGA’s Nicole Pierce and Karyn Hayes-Ryan at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Pictured from left to right: Mike Geggus, Sue Gordon, and Terry Busch.